‘The Puffy Chair’ Tells the Story of a Trip to Atlanta (and to Adulthood)

The Puffy Chair

“The Puffy Chair” is a low-key road movie that, fittingly enough, has knocked around the festival circuit for a while and opened in a few theaters before arriving in New York today. The journey it depicts is similarly unhurried: a van ride from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Atlanta, with a stop at a furniture warehouse to pick up the purple recliner that gives the film its title and the story its reason for being.

The chair is a gift, purchased on eBay by Josh (Mark Duplass) as a birthday present for his father. Accompanying Josh is his girlfriend, Emily (Kathryn Aselton), who wants more of a commitment from him than he is willing to make. They are joined by Josh’s brother, Rhett, whose main accomplishment — apart from growing an impressive beard — has been to videotape a lizard in the bushes outside his suburban apartment complex.

The chair, which is supposedly an exact replica of one that Rhett and Josh’s father had when they were young, takes up a lot of space in the van and also does its share of metaphorical work. Most obviously, for the brothers, it stands for a lost world of childhood. Or maybe not so lost. For Rhett and Josh — and to a lesser extent for Emily — adulthood is a land as remote as the jungles of New Guinea. Josh, who used to play in a band, now tries to manage other bands without much success. Rhett (Rhett Wilkins) specializes in precipitous decisions — like marrying a woman (Julie Fischer) he meets during a stopover at an independent movie theater — and passionate, impractical statements of principle.

“The Puffy Chair,” written by Mr. Duplass and his brother, Jay, who directed (Ms. Aselton is credited as a co-producer), treats its characters with tolerant, amused patience. Emily seems like the most sensible, so much so that you wonder what she’s doing with Josh, who is shown to be less than honest and supremely passive-aggressive. His indifference to Emily’s loveliness verges on sadism. Perhaps she finds his soft, childish side comforting, or maybe the other guys on North Sixth Street are even bigger losers than he is. In any case, it seems that Josh and Emily would rather talk baby talk than express their affection in more grown-up ways.

The story — slight enough to make Raymond Carver read like Dostoyevsky — does lead Josh up to one moment of decisive action, which Rhett outdoes and defeats. The Duplasses practice an aesthetic of diffidence, refusing to look beyond the small-scale experiences and immediate concerns of the characters. As a result, the stakes in “The Puffy Chair” seem very small, even as its scenes are often well observed and occasionally very funny. But its fidelity to its characters’ view of the world — although they are presumably college graduates, they seem never to have read a book or expressed an opinion — is more a liability than a virtue. “The Puffy Chair” is as modest as their ambitions and as narrow as their curiosity about the world beyond themselves.

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Directed by Jay Duplass; written by Mark Duplass and Jay Duplass; director of photography, Jay Duplass; edited by Jay Deuby; produced by Mark Duplass; released by Roadside Attractions and Netflix. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 85 minutes.